Performance in Halo

Halo is a classical 3D-action game, very similar to Unreal and Unreal 2. the game was first developed for X-Box gaming console based on NVIDIA chip. However, then they ported the gaming engine to the PC platform and as a result it needed to be seriously modified. The Halo graphics engine uses pixel shaders 2.0, 1.4 and 1.1 for various surfaces and effects.

Halo features special built-in options for graphics cards performance adjustment. When you start the game with the “-timedemo” key, Halo displays a sequence of scripted scenes as fast as possible, and them shows you the average fps rate for all of them. Unfortunately, scripted scenes used here appear much easier for the graphics cards compared to the workload during real gaming experience. However, these results still give us some idea of the graphics cards performance in this game.

Halo tests were performed with forced pixel shaders 2.0 and with maximum graphics quality settings.

We didn’t run any tests with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing, because Halo doesn’t support this function.

Here are the obtained results:

Well, the results of applied optimizations seem to be more than evident. NVIDIA graphics cards perform as fast as ATI based ones. However, they owe these good results not only to the shaders optimizing compiler. On NVIDIA GeForce FX graphics cards, the Halo graphics engine uses half-precision pixel shaders 2.0, which provides the NVIDIA GPUs with some performance advantages.

However, I didn’t reveal any issues caused by these pixel shaders optimizations or any calculations precision worsening. The only remark here is that sometimes some objects of the scenes appear to have no fog around them.

When we enabled anisotropic filtering, ATI performed somewhat batter, which I have actually expected.

So, the new NVIDIA and ATI chips perform almost similarly in Halo. Only the enabled anisotropic filtering provides ATI RADEON 9800 XT and 9800 PRO with some performance advantage over the rivals.